I attended a talk by Gurcharan Das about his latest book (released quite a while ago), The Difficulty of being Good: The subtle Art of Dharma a few days ago at The Attic (you have to check it out).
One of the really interesting thing he highlighted, which I believe we all inherently know but never act upon was envy. He claims, envy isn’t the same as jealousy. Jealousy can be understood. If you suspect your wife fancying another bloke, that’s aiite, and I guess it is legitimate for you to feel jealous.
Envy is a completely different ball park. Envy destroys you from within. It is which makes you feel a lesser being because of someone else’s success. And while some might argue that it motivates them, the entire basis of that motivation is, flawed. Because, your actions might not be directed at helping yourself, but instead be directed at bringing the other person down. He gave the example of Duryodhan and then traveled few thousand years to give another example of Anil Ambani.
Apparently a study that had taken place at HBS a while back asked a bunch of folks whether they would like to earn 50,000 USD or 100,000 USD per year. The condition being: In the former case, their peer group earns 25,000 USD and ion the latter case, they earn 200,000 USD. Envy conquered all.
Nissim Nicholas Taleb in his famous Fooled By Randomness also stressed on this point when he said that, yuppies who earned their first bonus on Wall Street shifted from their smaller suburbs (where they were quite affluent) to a more posh neighborhood and were mightily depressed. Clearly, given that the new neighborhood now has people far far richer than the yuppie.
The biggest problem with Envy in my opinion is it’s ever lasting alliance with one’s ego.
